US President Donald Trump suggested that the nationwide grounding of flights was linked to outdated and damaged infrastructure on which the Federal Aviation Administration relies. His comment was reported by Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy.
“This sounds like a situation where we’re dealing with very old and damaged infrastructure on which the Federal Aviation Administration relies,” Trump said, according to Doocy.
The journalist added that the president did not believe the cause was a cyberattack or a problem with artificial intelligence. “I asked him about it and he said it didn’t appear to be the case,” the journalist said. According to him, Trump noted that no one had claimed responsibility for the incident, as might be expected in a large-scale attack on critical infrastructure.
FAA halted departures nationwide
The Federal Aviation Administration ordered a nationwide halt to departures because of a communications problem that affected 22 regional air traffic control centers. The order was introduced “due to extraordinary circumstances and for security reasons.”
Later, the FAA authorized the resumption of departures. According to data cited by the Associated Press, at least 827 flights had been diverted. Around 11,000 flights carrying more than 1.5 million passengers were scheduled to depart after 4:00 p.m. local time, creating a risk of further delays and cancellations.
International flights were handled separately. The European aviation agency temporarily suspended flights to the US at the FAA’s request, while some flights from San Francisco to Hawaii and Asia were cleared for takeoff. Flights within Alaska and Hawaii themselves were not affected to the same extent.
Authorities do not point to a cyberattack
Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin said there was no evidence that the outage was the result of a hostile attack. “This is a telecommunications outage at this point,” he said, assuring that all aircraft in the air had been accounted for and that there was no immediate danger to passengers.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy described the air traffic control system as “extremely old” and said that an analog system had been overloaded with data. The new SMART system, which uses artificial intelligence to detect problems and recommend aircraft rerouting, did not appear to be connected to the outage. ASI, the company that developed it, also denied that the system was the cause of the shutdown.
The US government is already replacing some of the equipment. On November 5, Duffy announced that the E-IDS system was replacing four systems from the 1980s that were used at more than 400 sites. The plan is for the new technology to be deployed at 435 sites by the end of 2028.
Sources: apnews.com, washingtonpost.com, thedailybeast.com